After hearing psychedelic music, I became a rock music fan and went to many concerts. In the early 1970s, the general trend was for pompous, self-involved rock theatrics. The beatnik notion of “poet-is-priest” became “rock star-is-priest,” and the rock concert audience was transformed into a hedonized mass, generating a group consciousness orchestrated by the rock singer. As at a church service or football game, the audience was enticed to sing along or raise lit matches in unison. Two concerts changed everything for me: one by Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, the other was a concert by Iggy and the Stooges at a small biker bar in Wayne, Michigan.

The two shows were quite different. Sun Ra’s shows at this time were huge, showy and spectacular. The stage was filled with tons of equipment and his “Arkestra,” as well as dancers, and props. The aesthetic was a mixture of African music, exotica, big band, science fiction, Greek chorus, and political rally. It was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard. The audience would be excited into a dancing frenzy by throbbing, African-style drumming, then Sun Ra, or Mr. Mystery, as he would sometimes call himself, would start to fuck with your head, shifting at breakneck speed from schmaltzy big-band arrangements to strange neo-Egyptian poetry and long nonsense chants, to weird skits about “outer space employment agencies.” You were constantly being asked to abruptly shift gears. At one point you might be swept up bodily only to be dropped on your ass by twenty minutes of harsh, electronic white noise. It was the most intellectually and physically demanding show I have ever seen. Afterward I climbed a fence, got backstage, and met Sun Ra. He was very approchable. When asked how his show differed from James Brown’s equally elaborate, but more pleasure-oriented performance, Sun Ra replied, “James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need.”

During an intense winter snowstorm, I braved hitchhiking from Ann Arbor through to a particularly redneck rural area outside Detroit to see the Stooges. When I arrived at the “club,” I found it was a small biker bar. I was the first one there. Passing the time, I asked the bouncer, a huge, fat biker, whether he had ever seen the Stooges. “No,” he said, “But if the prick throws up on stage, I’m going to kick his ass.” When the Stooges arrived, Iggy was dressed in a ridiculous jazz-dancer’s outfit, a kind of leotard with a spangled skirt. His eyes were sloppily ringed with eyeliner, and a cigarette drooped from his lips. His whole demeanor said, “Fuck you.” I could feel the current of hatred spread through the bikers. Iggy was the total front man; the rest of the band barely moved. They stood stiff and erect like store window dummies, their faces blank. They were the perfect foil; all eyes were focused on Iggy, a master of body gesture. Every move was charged, and his moronic, contorted dancing seemed inspired, like an acrobat possessed by the spirit of an epileptic Jerry Lewis. The show started off simply enough, with a few upbeat rock tunes that get the crowd going. Iggy incited the audience to respond to him, got them heated up—they want Iggy. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped, singling out a girl pushed up against the stage, one of the fans to whom a second earlier he had been gesturing and enticing. The room went silent.

“Get this bitch out of here. She tried to touch me! We won’t play unless she is removed.” The tension started to build. She moved out of sight. Then Iggy asked, “What do you want to hear?” The crowd yelled back an incomprehensible roar of song titles.

“Oh… ‘Louie Louie.’”

So the band launched into “Louie Louie.” It’s hard to explain now what “Louie, Louie” meant at that time, when rock music was trying to be important. It was the first song a hillbilly rocker would learn on his guitar to impress the girls at a school dance—a throwback to an embarrassing time when rock music was entertainment for fraternity boys, not an instrument of social change. It was a slap in the face to the audience. But they politely suffered through it, even good-naturedly hoopin’ and hollerin’ a little bit.

Then Iggy asked again, “What do you want to hear?” The same roar came back.

“Oh… ‘Louie Louie.’”

And the band tore into “Louie, Louie” for a second time. “Louie, Louie” was played three times in a row. The audience was starting to get antsy. The band did another rocker and the audience regained its faith, only to have Iggy pull some other disruptive stunt.

He was an amazing performer. I have never seen better. He played the audience like a fish. The crowd was in the palm of his hand. They would suffer insult after insult, have their faces rubbed over and over again in their own complicity, and come running back for more. This doesn’t sound like much after fifteen years of punk music, in which these stage antics are the norm. But Iggy invented this stuff.

After about five or six songs, a big biker shouted, “Hey! Poodle Boy,” and hit Iggy with an egg. The next thing I saw Iggy doing a belly flop into the audience; and then a riot broke out—a real traditional biker bar fistfight. Chairs and tables overturned, the place was cleared within fifteen minutes. The lights were turned up, the band had run out the door, and I was left standing standing there babbling, “What happened?” It was the best piece of theater I have ever seen.

Everything of major importance I know about performing, I learned from these two concerts.

Brechtian Theatre Techniques, by Mike Kelley

R.I.P.

The 1998 Robert Smigel animated short film “Conspiracy Theory Rock”, part of a March 1998 “TV Funhouse” segment, has been removed from all subsequent airings of the Saturday Night Live episode where it originally appeared. Michaels claimed the edit was done because it “wasn’t funny”. The film is a scathing critique of corporate media ownership, including NBC’s ownership by General Electric/Westinghouse.

Via Tagbanger.

DAF

According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.

By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.

A few of his more significant design decisions: Your standard wall map will often paint the U.S. states different colors so their shapes are easily grasped. But Imus’ map uses thick lines to indicate state borders and reserves the color for more important purposes—green for denser forestation, yellow for population centers. Instead of hypsometric tinting (darker colors for lower elevations, lighter colors for higher altitudes), Imus uses relief shading for a more natural portrait of U.S. terrain.

The Essential Geography of the United States of America via Slate.

Frans Lanting

So apparently some jerks managed to get some “badware” links into my .htmls so Google declared me off limits to the internet. Think I weeded them out now. Fingers crossed… Anybody have any idea how this happens? I’m stumped.